Atom Trails
by NoFootprintsInSand
Summary: The wings of a thousand butterfly effects cut her until she bleeds


**Muggle London, January 1927**

He is tiny, far too small for the crib. His blankets look scratchy - rough wool, greying and frayed. The room is cold and bare and dark, patches of damp up in the corners. His little fists are clenched, his legs are bent; still not straightened from his time curled in the womb.

He has a shock of black hair. Along with blue veins it is stark against the white of his skin, and he roots in vain against the blanket. Hungry.

He does not wail though.

 _("he was a quiet child, never cried")_

He seems to already have learnt that no one will come.

She clutches the dagger in her pocket, steps from one foot to the other. Bites the inside of her cheek, refuses to cry, refuses to be weak. He is so small, so _helpless_ , it would take but a second.

Just one second of evil for decades of evil to cease to be.

She cuts herself on the edge, feels how her pocket goes wet with blood.

One second. _One_.

She reaches into the crib, hand empty, no dagger, and touches the back of his hand. Her touch is feather light, almost fearful. Would he be cold, would he be slimy to the touch, this tiny demon, this fledgling creature of doom?

He immediately clutches at her finger. His skin is warm. Soft.

 _Grasp reflex, it's the grasp reflex,_ she knows. Just a reflex. All newborns display it. She knows that. And _yet_ …

She sees her blood smeared on his hand and she wants to vomit.

A dry sob escapes her as she lifts him from the cot, careful to support his neck. She has learnt with Teddy, poor orphaned Teddy.

 _Oh Remus. Oh Tonks. Oh Fred oh Moody oh Snape oh Dumbledore oh Harryronnevillelunaginny oh no no no_.

So she stands there, out of her time, and she cries for her friends into their murderer's wispy baby hair.

"I hate you. You're a monster," she whispers to him.

Unfortunately, she thinks as she holds him close to her chest, _she_ is not. Not quite. Not _yet_.

She will have to alter her plans, then. She will have to play a longer game.

 _Too long too long how will I bear it?_

She rocks him and whisper-hums a near forgotten lullaby and the crudely altered Time-Turner at her breast is burning a hole through her skin.

She will fix this.

* * *

It is not hard to get a job at the orphanage. They are desperate for help of any kind, and far too few questions are asked.

She spends as much time as she can get away with around Tom and she tries to ignore the way her skin crawls sometimes when she puts her cheek against his. She reads him book after book after book and pretends not to notice how still he sits on her lap, how it seems his mind latches onto every word.

She cuddles and she sings and she coos and she spends her nights curled in her lumpy bed up in the attic, whispering "nurture, not nature" into her pillow. A mantra so threadbare, so thin, that she sometimes can se the dull light of Tom's solemn gaze right through it. She refuses to cry, and she tries not to think.

She estimates that she has got a year, maybe two, before he will come to remember her. She must make the most of it. She must learn to love him, and teach him to love too.

Teach him humanity.

She must succeed. There are no other options.

None.

She keeps the dagger in her pocket though.

Just in case.

* * *

 _Spending nearly two years in the same time out of my time have weakened me severely, my memories warp and sometimes I struggle to cast spells._

 _I had not known this, I must be cleverer, I must flit more, dip in and out of years and decades._

 _It is too dangerous to stand still._

* * *

 **Muggle London, 1932-1938**

She is Cecilia, her hair is blonde and her eyes are green and she says she works for Southwark Council. She visits the orphanage once a month and if she pays extra attention to a quiet boy with black hair and faraway eyes then no one has got the time to mention it.

She reads for him still, books about history from the future; she reads him tales of genocide and evil while she holds him close and strokes his hair. She speaks of right and wrong and goodness and compassion when she teaches him how to tie his laces, and every time she leaves she kisses his pale cheek and hugs him close.

She is unsure if he misses her while she is gone, because his face is still and betrays nothing, but she would like to think he is

One day she finds him in a tucked-away part of the walled garden. He is weeping silently next to the stiffening body of a cat, and it occurs to her that this is the very first time she has seen his tears. She kneels among the dandelions and bindweeds, and she lifts his chin with a gentle finger, ready to comfort.

Ready to rejoice.

"Tom? What happened?"

He wipes at his tears. "I killed it. I hit it on the head with a rock until it died."

His gaze is empty of regret as it meets hers and she wants to throw up. "But why, Tom?"

"I wanted to see if I could make it alive again."

She feels cold and she feels warm and she forces herself to breathe and not put her hands around his fragile neck and _squeeze_ until she has saved the world.

"Nothing and no one can come back from death, Tom. It's impossible."

 _Except all my friends I will make it so their death never happened I will I will_

"My mum died and left me here because she was weak. I will not die, Cecilia. Ever."

He starts weeping again, and she clutches him in an embrace and she shivers. "You must never hurt another living being, Tom. Never. It's wrong. I won't come and see you anymore if you do. I mean it."

He cries harder, wets the front of her blouse as she holds her own tears back. He is five, a budding monster held close to her chest, but one disappearingly small part of him is just a tiny boy terrified of death.

She must cling to that part.

Her hold is so very weak.

* * *

 _I hide in a cottage by the beach in the seventies. I practice Occlumency surrounded by mustard and brown and vinyl because I know I will need it soon._

 _I can feel time doing things to me, breaking parts of me down. I have not been back to my proper time for years - or days? - and I am an anomaly spinning wildly out of place._

 _Tiny little pieces of me are disappearing._

 _I can no longer remember my parents' name._

* * *

 **Scotland, May 1942**

It is 1942 and in two months time Tom Marvolo Riddle will kill his father.

Unless she can stop him.

Her name is Helena but she looks like herself because she is too weak now to look like somebody else. She is the assistant librarian and she refuses to think of all the unsavoury things she had to do to be here, because if she succeeds they will all be worth it.

Every. Single. One.

She spends her days always keeping Tom in her peripheral vision and plotting and trying not to cry at the future memories held within the ancient stones; the faint whispers of the happiness she will feel here. Had felt here.

Tom is often, often, in the library. She has chosen her place well.

A willowy boy now, is Tom, on the cusp of adulthood, with sharp edges and dark eyes. But she can still see the toddler in him, the young boy whose grazed knees she kissed and who once bludgeoned a cat to death. Yes, he is quiet-spoken and polite and so very full of charm but…. she can see the perpetual rage lurking at the very back of his carefully blank gaze.

He is…. _other_. Queerness humming on the edges; distorted notes just slightly out of reach. He imitates emotions and he gets it almost right, but there are schisms inside, fissures running through him, and she knows now, can see clearly, that she did not do enough back when he was younger.

But he is not fully gone, not really, not yet. She is sure she planted enough of a seed in him as a small boy, she is sure he can be brought back, she is sure she is sure she is sure.

Anything else would be unbearable.

Unthinkable.

* * *

 _In the evenings, after dinner in the Great Hall, I close the door to my little room, turn time and spend my nights back at the beach cottage or in a squat in early 80s Liverpool. But it is not enough, it is not nearly enough._

 _The wings of a thousand butterfly effects cut me until I bleed._

* * *

What spare time she has got she spends in the Restricted Section and she feel so at home here but also she does not.

She never thought that being surrounded by books in the wrong time could hurt her, never knew how displaced knowledge could rub so wrong against her brain, disjointed and awkward and jagged.

The headaches are terrible, the little flashes of light in front of her eyes blinding, the dryness in her mouth unbearable.

Perhaps that is how he surprises her with her guard down, how one afternoon she only realises he is standing close behind and reading along with her when she feels the little puffs of his breath on the back of her neck.

She turns, and slams the book shut at the same time, and her "Just what do you think you're doing, Mr. Riddle?" sounds too sharp and shrill and broken to her own ears.

He pays no heed to the tone of her voice and the acuteness of her wretchedness. "Have we met before, Helena? You seem…familiar."

She should scold him for the brazen familiarity of using her first name, but she is feeling too undone and breathless to waste words. He cannot possibly remember her as she looks now, he was far too little. It is impossible it is…

…as impossible as his preternatural calmness and poise facing her.

"No, Mr. Riddle. No we have not. Now you should leave. You're not allowed in the Restricted Section without prior permission, as well you know."

He is too close to her, tall above her where she sits, and his eyes are almost soft as he ignores her. He looks down again at the book she was reading. "What is a horcrux?" he asks, and by now she knows him well enough to taste sincerity on the air between them.

She cannot breathe.

And so she is the one to leave instead, clutching the damn, traitorous book to her chest, she leaves him standing there, and all her air sticks in her throat.

He had not known. He had not _known_.

But now he did.

* * *

 _I have to move more and more and more now, at least twice every night, as soon as I stop and stand still I can feel pieces of self - pieces of mind, pieces of me - fall away._

 _I do not know when I last slept. If I sleep I stay still too long, and I attempt to dance back in forth in time so fast that my body is fooled, believes it can survive without any rest._

 _I cannot remember the green of Harry's eyes, or the copper of Ron's hair._

 _Everything is becoming grey._

* * *

 **Scotland, July 1942**

Now Tom is keeping her in his peripheral vision as much as she is keeping him. They move in the corner of each other's eyes, ripple each other's shadows. He seems to be there always, studying her as much as he is studying the books, and his gaze is vehement and curious. They do not speak, but he is careful to ensure that she knows exactly what kind of books he is reading, and it is desperation rather than sense than leads her to getting Horace Slughorn sacked. She feels bad for the man, he is a harmless fool, but all she has got left is straws.

When she sees the helplessness and cold rage in Tom's eyes as he is forced to return to the orphanage for the summer, then she realises that she has got even less than that.

* * *

 _When he returned this autumn, that dull sheen of the Resurrection Stone in Marvolo Gaunt's ring flashing on his finger, then I turned time the farthest I have ever wrenched it. I am not even sure humanity existed yet where I went, I did not check, and I screamed and I screamed and I screamed, primal fury and terror echoing between newly born mountain ranges._

* * *

 **Scotland, May 1943**

And it gets only worse and worse and worse.

Nosebleeds, nosebleeds every day now. She hates herself for painting precious old library books red, even as she races to find a way to stop the Chambers from opening, stop him.

She fails here too. She arrives at the girl's lavatories just as Myrtle hits the floor. She meets Tom's eyes in the mirror above the sink and he smiles, a brief flash of fledgling evil in dusky glass before he is gone, and she knows right then that she must leave this time.

She sits next to the still warm body of Myrtle and she rocks jerkily back and forth.

* * *

 _The headaches were splitting my skull in two. I had stayed too long in one time and place again, and even with the precautions I thought I had taken I had to move further ahead, much further ahead than I had planned._

 _And he saw me, he saw me in there. He saw me. It wasn't safe anymore._

 _I could not stay to help Hagrid, I could not stay to prevent the creation of that damned diary, I could do nothing at all._

 _I did not even bother making up a story, it was too fraught, too difficult to gather my thoughts and keep all the pieces of me in one place._

 _I simply left Hogwarts, disappeared without a trace._

* * *

 **Knockturn Alley, December 1955**

Borgin and Burkes and she are here to save Hepzibah Smith.

Here to gather up broken pieces of his soul and throw them back at him, hoping they are jagged enough, sharp enough, to stick to him, reverse time and gather everything back together.

Perhaps she could be made whole again too, but she thinks not.

Not any more. Not any longer.

The bell chimes darkly as she steps through the door. As she blinks against the dimness and dust she is assuaged by the same queer disturbance she had experienced in the library at Hogwarts, back in the early 1940s. The artifacts and idols and bones around her, they thrum with dark magic out of her time, and spikes of ice stab her temples, fire ants crawl across her skin.

The shop is unattended, and she paces as she waits, picks up trinkets that vibrate maliciously against the palm of her hand, and she avoids the ancient ornate mirrors at all costs.

She cannot stand to see her own face.

He comes from out back and even though she had expected this, planned for this, she still starts at the sight of him, so hard and uncontrolled that she nearly drops the little dark globe she is clutching in her hand.

"Helena."

Her name from his lips does not come with the lilt of a question or the exclamation of surprise; rather it falls to the floor like a lead ball of creeping dread.

He is not surprised to see her. Not surprised at all, even though it has been 12 years seen they saw each other last

For him, for _him_. For her it was yesterday. Or maybe last week.

It is tricky to keep track.

She looks at him with feigned puzzlement, then pretends to remember even though she wants to forget, "Tom Riddle?" she asks. "How unexpected."

Gently, delicately, he takes the globe from her hand and replaces it on the shelf, then takes a step back, gives her space even though she can feel that it is a lie. He looks her up and down, and she forces herself to meet his eyes. "The little librarian who disappeared. Caused quite a stir, you did. And why, you don't look a day older than when I saw you last."

His voice is sardonic and his eyes are calculating, they are cold. And curious. She is a mystery he has not yet solved, and she breathes easy even if just for a second.

She is still safe. She might still succeed.

But not today. She knows what she needs to know now, knows where to find him. Knows that things have not yet been so significantly altered that he does not work here still. And more importantly, he knows that she is here now. Around.

That is enough for now. She must leave, and regroup, and hold the remnants of her plan in unsteady hands.

"Well, I must be on my way. Good day, Tom. Nice to see you again." Then, as an afterthought: "Merry Christmas."

She feels sure he hates Christmas.

She leaves, abruptly, jerkily. But she knows she will come back.

So does he.

His voice follows her out the door: "See you soon, Helena."

* * *

 _It feels like I travel on lightning, electricity, as I flit and skid between seconds and decades, and the air is thick with ozone. But there is no choice, no choice at all; I cannot afford stillness or sleep._

 _Electricity used to be therapy, and I know my laugh is hysterical._

 _It makes me ashamed, but I cannot seem to stop._

* * *

 **Diagon Alley, January 1956**

Next she allows him to happen upon her even though they both know it is a lie.

Her smile is rigid when she pretends to suddenly notice him by the bar.

His eyes are mocking when he pretends to be surprised to see her sitting over by the fireplace.

They are in the Cauldron, she chose it because pain is grounding, keeps her in one place, holds her still. And what is more painful than rose-tinted memories that may never come to be?

And there are so many happy memories here in this place, held snugly between these walls, but if memories have not yet happened then she supposes that they cannot exist.

She tries not to think about it too much.

She beckons him over and he comes with smooth movements and a smile like a knife edge. They pretend to drink Firewhisky and she wonders how much he knows, how much he is guessing, how much is beyond his grasp. His eyes are blank, giving nothing away, and she remembers how he would do the same as a child.

"I looked for you, you know. Tried to find out what happened. It was most infuriating, what you did."

"What did I do?" she asks even though she knows, of course she knows.

His sneer tells her that he is aware of her games, but for now he seems content to play.

"Disappeared. I asked around, and you didn't resign, you didn't say goodbye to anyone. Very _strange_ , wouldn't you agree?"

"I had urgent business elsewhere."

His dark eyes flashes but he leaves the subject be.

For now.

"I have some books back at the shop you might want to see."

It is abrupt and he is laying a trap and she must walk straight into it if she is to succeed.

"How so?"

"Well, you are a librarian, are you not? I thought these books might interest you. Old. Rare. I have collected them for the shop for some years now, travelled far and wide on behalf of my employers to find them. You won't find their like in the library at Hogwarts, that's for sure."

His voice is indifferent but his eyes are not, anymore. They are sharp; they are cutting her in two. This is a vivisection, and she is pinned to his board as she takes a sip of Firewhisky. A real one this time. The mirage of courage is worth the risk of slipping up.

"They would indeed interest me," she says, as she obligingly sticks her head in the snare.

Because there was never a choice.

They walk the dark cobbled streets together, towards Borgin and Burke's, and she glances sideways at him as the white of his face flickers in and out of gaslight. He is not a boy anymore, not at all, his face is strong and his eyes are wrong, and he seems to belong to the shadows of this place, to the night.

Their frozen breaths curl about them as he unlocks the shop door and light their way through the dark with his wand, his hand heavy on her arm.

"We keep the precious books, the rare and priceless ones, back here," he says as he unlatches a heavy door and leads her through, flicking candles alight with his wand as he goes.

It is a small room, too small, with books everywhere and a desk in the middle.

The books, they all sing with darkness. Thick, tactile shadows seem to emanate from them, seem to crawl towards her feet, up her body, to her temples.

"These are all evil," she says softly.

He snorts where he stands just inside the door. "You believe in such childish notions as good and evil? Really? There are no such things, Helena. There is only knowledge, and knowledge is power."

He sweeps his hand carelessly across the room, and his voice is nearly a growl. "Do you know how much power is contained within all these pages, there for the taking? The power of life, the power of death. Don't presume to dismiss it because of narrow-minded labels. Go on. Look."

She moves closer to the shelf on her right, and she looks, and she touches, and she feels.

Because even though these books are every shade of black, and even though they hurt her with their displaced knowledge, she cannot help the delirious smile on her face as she runs her fingers up and down old spines, as she fancies old knowledge and magic flow through the bound leather and into the tips of her fingers. For the first time in years and decades and centuries she is Hermione. Not Helena, not Cecilia, not any of her other assumed identities. She is just...herself, and she is standing truly still, and her hair crackles with magic and her skin tingles. It is the headiest, most seductive rush, even though it is wrong.

And dangerous.

His low voice is close to her ear. She had not heard him approach. Too close, far too close, she can feel him. "Where have I seen you before?"

Oh, is he not _clever_.

She gathers herself together, but not quite enough to stop touching the books.

"At Hogwarts."

"Funny."

"Only there, Tom. Nowhere else," she swears even though she knows he burns - will burn - oaths to cinders.

"Well, there is something…off about you. And familiar. I thought so back at Hogwarts, I think so now. You _are_ something to me, and I don't know what."

She feels his hands on her shoulders and his chest against her back.

"But I will find out what it is, you know I will."

His lips against her hair now, his hands moving from her shoulders down to her front, her heart.

"This isn't appro…. I'm older than you," she says even as she realises that by now he is older than her.

"Well, you don't look it," he breathes against the back of her neck and again she ponders nature and nurture.

She has known him as a baby and a boy and she will know him as a monster ruling the world, but right now he is a young man balancing precariously on the cusp of evil, and what is rightness and beauty and virtue anyway?

"It is strange, Helena", he says as he whispers kisses along her jaw, "but I feel like I've known you always. I feel like you've always been with me. Isn't that remarkable?"

 _Not remarkable at all, because I have_ , she thinks as she struggles not to reach behind her and wrap her hands hard around his throat to stop him, or run her fingers through his hair to encourage him.

Because this is too much, too much at once. It feels so good to be touched, and so wrong to be touched, and she burns and freezes and aches and floats.

Eventually though, when one of his hands are splayed across her collarbone, the other wound tight in her hair and his lips are at the corner of her mouth, she pulls free and she runs.

He allows her to go. She is not snared enough for his liking, she thinks as she clutches the Turner at her chest and flees a few centuries away.

* * *

 _I wander Scotland during the witch trials with the stench of burning flesh in my nose and I am trying to remember which memories I have forgotten now._

 _Oh I never knew that realities could be so like gossamer, so light, so fine._

 _So very easily broken._

* * *

She comes back to him of course, and they see each other every now and then, when he is not working, when she is not hurtling breathlessly through time.

She is so very terrified of standing still once more.

He does not try to touch her again, and his dark eyes tell her that he knows she is here, with him, for a purpose. And he is happy to wait her out.

She is his riddle now. She is to be unpicked, flayed open, turned inside out.

He needs time for that.

He appears to spend time with no one but her. No friends that she can see, no acquaintances, no slavering acolytes ready to obey his every whim. More solitary, she thinks, than before.

So she is changing things then, she is altering realities, but she does not know if she is breaking them or mending them and if she ever got to sleep it would keep her awake at night.

Now, now it haunts her waking nightmares instead.

* * *

 **Knockturn Alley, April 1956**

Of course it is he who smashes their standstill to pieces, fast enough too that she has barely any time to react.

"Why were you there?"

"Where do you mean?"

She turns from the books, always the books, turns to face him and her practiced smile shatters when she sees his face. He has let go of the jovial facade, terrifyingly sudden, and his smile is vicious, his eyes are ricocheting and tearing candlelight.

"In the lavatories. Back at Hogwarts. You know, just before you upped and left the school with no explanation."

"It was the girls' lavatories, Riddle. Why would I not be there?" She turns back, attempts to dismiss him and the subject with her heart rattling in her chest.

"Are you not curious why I was there?"

" _No_ ," she bites out, moving towards the door of the reading room, needs to leave, now, right now, there is too much static electricity in the room, and currents, they are pulling at her body, soon it will be too late and…

He has moved to block the door, but crawling fear makes her reckless and she pushes him aside, wand in hand, and moves out into the shop proper.

He follows, and his pace is leisurely. The shop door clicks locked in front of her as she is halfway across the floor, and he moves in front of her again.

"Who are you, who are you really?" he asks, voice soft and eyes hard. "You are not who you say you are, I know that much."

She can feel him whispering at the outskirts of her mind, attempting entry, lightly at first, then with force, but she is able to keep him out. He is powerful even now, but he is not yet the most terrifying and mighty Legilimens the world has ever seen, and her Occlumency practice pays off.

It pays off, yes, but she is already severely weakened and this takes the last of her strength. Now she cannot even back away when he advances on her. He is not a large man, but where he is lithe she is tiny, and it seems that right now he would enjoy the act of hurting her physically rather than magically.

Blood on his fists he wants blood on his fists.

"I am Helena", she says, and she meets his gaze head on, keeps her chin high and her fist clenched around her wand. "Just Helena."

He strikes serpent-fast, her wrist in a vice, and he grips so hard that she knows he will fracture it. Her wand clatters to the floor and he kicks it under a cabinet as a mocking afterthought.

The pain is unbearable, and she grinds her teeth with the need to whimper, to wail. She knows that the sound of her pain would just encourage him, excite him.

He is a predator, and she stays silent and still as he breaks her wrist like a dry twig.

"I don't believe you, Just-Helena. I really don't believe you." His smile is cold and mocking, and his eyes flame of hellfire as he lets his mask fully slip, and she stares at the awfulness and darkness within.

Sees the jagged twisted facets of his mind, as he allows her to see him, truly see him, for the first time.

She wants to laugh at herself, cackle hysterically at her own naivety. How could she ever have thought that all the cuddles she gave him as a baby and all the fairytales she read him as a toddler, all the morality lessons she recited to him when a young boy, could repair what is so inherently wrong inside of him?

He pulls her close, pulls her into him, and wraps his other arm around her waist in a cruel parody of tenderness, even as she feels the shattered bones in her wrist against each other under his fingers.

"Tell me this, at least," he whispers against her throat, "and speak truly: do you mean me harm?"

 _Are you my enemy?_

And here at least she can offer him some truth, and she lets him far enough into her mind to see it, taste it, as she meets his eyes square on. No. No she means him no harm. Not anymore. Not for a long time.

Not yet.

Lazily he flicks his wand and heals her wrist.

And for the first time since he killed all her friends in the future and she escaped into time, she allows herself the luxury of tears. She feels them, feels how warm they are as they silently run down her cheeks and over her lips.

He licks them away, and his tongue draw blood, and she cries so soundlessly in his grip.

And so...

Here, now. A precipice.

She cannot quite articulate her conviction, set it into words, but she knows, _knows_ , that her only chance now lies in giving herself to him completely, body and life. He will accept nothing less and she needs to him to need her.

She jumps.

And so when he pushes her against the cabinets she bares her throat, offers consummate submission and surrender, and he wolves it all down with horrifying glee.

His kisses are made of teeth and he punctures her soul with canines, tears at it with molars, swallows it down, pulls her inside of him even as he pushes inside her with one violent thrust.

She cannot tell where she ends and he begins, cannot tell which feeling belongs to whom, but she matches him kiss for kiss and thrust for thrust. She sees people walking past outside, so easy, so easy for them to turn their heads and see Tom and her inside, fucking up against the shelves. She swears she can feel him in her rib cage, pushing against her heart. All around them artefacts sing with darkness, and she stares at the images of their bodies bouncing between the many mirrors, sees how she is pinned against the wall, how he slams into her again and again, how he wraps his hand too hard around her throat, how her nails draw blood on his back, how her eyes break when she convulses around him.

The trap slams shut behind her, behind him, and this is the only way.

They wind up on the cold floor afterwards, too exhausted and spent to move, and she listens to his heartbeats as he strokes her back.

"You are very beautiful when you cry," he says, and his hold on her is ravenous and still far too hard but there is something like wonder in his voice. And she can taste corrupted worship on his tongue when he holds her down and kisses her again and again.

There, there.

The tiniest, flickering spark of hope. So faint as to be non-existent, so faint as to be the last fleeting tendrils of a dream.

It will have to be something.

* * *

 _There are timelines in kinks and knots around my fingers and they are wound tight enough to cut my circulation in two._

 _Sometimes, sometimes when I am feeling particularly, awfully honest to myself, I will look truth straight in the eye, and I will see how he is now my only firm point left._

 _And I will cry._

 _And I will try to forget again._

* * *

 **Knockturn Alley, October 1956**

Hepzibah's death date comes and goes, and she feels the jerky shift of realities as they realign. She feels it in her shaking hands and threadbare memories and sharp ribs.

She feels it in her crushing headache and in her eyes that never get to sleep.

She does not know where this will go.

They are reading together, they are always reading, on opposite sides of the little room, and she leans her head against the shelf, a minute of rest before she needs to leave again. Because she can remember Harry, she remembers him, she does, but the others are fading and she cannot bear it, she cannot bear to forget them, she must move faster, pick up pieces of her memories as she goes.

But first, some stillness.

It is close to peaceful here, with the smell of leather and paper and his soft breathing from across the room. She could almost be grateful to him for allowing her this, the books and the silence, even though she knows he is only doing it to keep her close. Waiting for his chance to tear her open and read her bones and her brain and her veins, find what she is hiding, why she is orbiting him the way she is.

She is watching him now, how careful he is with the books, how gently he turns the pages, how reverently he reads the dark, heinous words within.

"You love books."

He turns to her, and his crooked smile is as close to genuine as she has ever seen.

"Yes", he says. "I think someone must have read to me a lot when I was little. But I can't remember who."

So she had done that much good at least. If nothing else she had done that.

He abandons his book then, and crouches in front of her where she sits on the floor, takes her chin in his hand and her mind in a vice.

But blocking him has become close to second nature now, and he is as adept at hiding his anger at being denied access. Just a cold flash betrays his fury.

"Oh ageless Helena with the ancient eyes, why are you here?" he says, and his eyes are mordant but his smile almost soft, and her skin crawls but she is heavy with need.

"Perhaps I'm here with you because I've got nowhere else to go." And it is a little piece of honesty in amongst all the lies.

"I like that," he whispers, "I like how you have no one but me."

He unbuttons her cardigan, long fingers, no magic, and he goes slowly, because he enjoys drawing it out until he doesn't anymore. She leans her head back as he rips the buttons off her camisole, feels the cold air on her skin, and feels his bite marks on her soul.

He follows the lines the Time-Turner has burnt into the soft skin between her breasts, maps it and trails it and wills it to give up her secrets. His tongue is wet and she wants it inside. "Whatever is this from?" he asks as his fingers digs into her hips.

"Pain." she answers, and kisses him to distract him even though they both know it will not work.

She never knows how much he knows. Has he any idea how lost she is in his timeline, how lost she is in the hinterlands of him? His tongue is cold in her mouth, but when he drags her upright, pushes her skirt up around her waist and snaps inside her as hard as he can, ruts her up against the books, then she does not think at all any longer.

It is bliss.

"I will find you out, you know I will,' he whispers in her ear as she comes, and she comes even harder, and it hurts.

She hates the curious gentleness of his hands afterwards, how he threads his fingers through her curls.

But more so she loves the splinter of pain in his eyes when she leaves.

* * *

 _The human body was not made for strain such as this, for moving back and forth in time, for breaking unbreakable laws. I feel soluble, I feel like I am leaving atoms of myself behind_

 _(a windy scattered trail of crumbs of me left through the times)_

 _as I hurl back and forth through the decades. I feel like I will disintegrate with one more jump. Feel like I am becoming transparent around the edges._

 _I laugh myself to tears and I spit chaos theory in the face._

 _Who am I fooling?_

 _I will break everything._

* * *

She learns to sleep again. Stolen minutes, sometimes hours, next to him on his narrow bed. It is bliss and it is shrapnel lodging in her brain.

She comes and she goes and he welcomes her back with snarls and eager hands, and he says goodbye again with indifference drawn around his mouth and carefully inscrutable eyes.

But she knows he longs for her when she is gone, and that is sweetness and it is pain, but it does not feel like victory.

Even though it should.

* * *

 _I see tiny changes in him, in his eyes, in the corners of his mouth. I feel it in his touch, fleeting whispers of softness in among all the fingerprints._

 _I do not know what to do with it. This has been my aim all along, has it not, make him edge closer to something human, and now I abhor it. I do not want his few flashes of tenderness, I want his harshness and cruelty and hard hands._

 _I cannot reciprocate. I have forgotten how._

* * *

 **Knockturn Alley, August 1957**

His little one-room attic flat.

He at his desk under the roof window, and the evening light slipping through it making his dark eyes golden and almost warm. She with snarled hair and in her slip on the rough wooden floor; the summer sundown making it stifling here up among the rafters.

She feels pulled and tugged, struggles to concentrate, fights to stay put. The hot air standing so still makes it worse; it makes her want to swirl it about and if she does she might accidentally lose another crucial piece of herself.

"When will you tell me? When will you tell me who you are?"

She is surprised, because he is rarely that undisguised these days, but she smiles at him easily and pulls her knees to her chest.

"I've told you already."

Lying to him is the easiest thing she has ever done and it is the hardest thing she has ever done.

"You look rather enchanting right now, you know. Lies suit you. It makes me care a little less that you are deceiving me."

She cannot bear the almost-real affection in his voice even though it is what she should want, so she spits out the best she can think of to wipe it away. "Why, a lowly Mudblood like me?" and then she tenses, prepares for a quick jump. There are limits to what he will allow her to get away with and this is far beyond.

He stays still, but she does not miss the bunching of his jaw and the flash of murder in his eyes, the flared nostrils.

"You are _nothing_ like..." he stops himself, starts over somewhere else entirely. "Yes, but you are my Mudblood. Mine."

He gets to her in a flash, pulls her towards him and she lets him, because there is not a choice, she does not want to have a choice. He kisses her like he wants to eat her, eat her tongue and her brain and all her thoughts and secrets. And she, she swallows down the midnight in him and she likes it and yet it is not enough.

They gorge on each other, bloodthirsty creatures both now, and she wants to keep this one moment suspended about her neck forever.

It is true somehow, even though it is shrouded in lies.

He is moving so savagely inside her that he is thrusting her heart out of place, and she is refusing to close her eyes, even as she fortifies her walls. The pain and the growls and the whimpers and the ecstasy, and they both come so hard she thinks this forsaken little place might implode all around them.

For a little while she does not feel like she is disappearing. A pity only that she is anchored to him.

"When you die I will give you the finest tomb," he whispers sleepily and her goosebumps are not from terror, not at all.

 _I_ _will have to leave you something to put inside it then._

She smiles, and kisses his jugular, and she knows, as he knows, that he does not want her to die.  
There is a peculiar shift inside her, as she lays there and watches his face almost soft in sleep, and her heart is a bird dying in her chest.

When she leaves him this time it hurts.

* * *

 _I walked through Bedlam, and the sound of chains and wailing and agony beat against my skull._

 _Women, children, filth._

 _I wanted to cry, to scream out my abhorrence at their deplorable condition, the evil unthinking way they were kept, their hopelessness._

 _But their insanity grounded me, and I kept my tears at bay, swallowed my screams._

 _Because I came here to use their anguish to stay focused, and the least I could do was to look at them all with unblinking eyes._

* * *

 **Knockturn Alley, November 1957**

A rare, silent moment, pressed up next to each other, naked skin wrapped about naked skin, and she allows herself to go mindless, senseless, floats in mute, delirious vacuum.

His voice whips at her, even though it is gentle.

"Sometimes… sometimes when you sleep, it is like you…flicker. Flicker in and out. Like static. Like shadows in moonlight."

Her heart beats the taste of blood into her mouth. She had not known this, had not known that her control of her body's presence in this time was quite so tenuous, so weak. She will not have long now, she really will not have long.

He runs his hand over her breasts and down her ribs, splays his fingers there. The white of his hand blends seamlessly with her pallor. "Sometimes when you stand in front of the window I could swear I see the sunlight through your body. It's… it's like you slowly, very slowly, are Disarappating. And the shadows under your eyes, they grow, and you are thinner than you were. Much thinner. Tell me what ails you, tell me who you are. I could help."

She studies him, his beautiful face and the darkness in his eyes, and she wonders how many times he has split his soul by now. His father, and Myrtle, not Hepzibah Smith, but there might be others, now, in this new reality she has weaved.

She does not know what he is doing when she is not here with him. He is as secretive as she is, and they dance an eternal dance of lies and artifice.

His features are still handsome and not warped. Not as many then, as before.

Not yet.

Could she do it? Could she tell him everything? Lay it all by his feet, all the ugliness, all the despair, and hope that the tiny seeds she had planted would be enough? Show him the crimes he had committed, would commit, and hers too? Would that be enough to turn him just so?

Of course not. She dares not. Too much, too much at stake.

She has veered so diabolically off course that she might never find her way back but at least his skin is warm. She moves into him again, presses her face into the crook of his neck, inhales the night within him.

"You can't help me, Tom."

She leaves the false safety of his skin again and looks at him, needs to see.

There is agony on his face, and wickedness too. He is become the strangest mosaic, rents of evil, flickers of lights, flashes of who he was, flashes of who he will come to be. And what he is now, here, with her.

A chimera of her making, and oh, what is it that she has wrought?

He kisses her breast, right above her heart, and he sighs.

"Where do you go, Helena? Where do you go at night, where do you go when you are not with me?"

"Somewhere you can never follow."

Her laugh is full of shards.

* * *

 _The timelines wound around my fingers, my wrists, my legs; they trash me about, and oh I am a puppet now, I am but a helpless marionette._

 _How sharp they are, these threads of time, so indifferent and unforgiving, when finally they cut clean through me._

 _I wonder that heart-blood could be so red._

 _I must stop writing now. This is it._

 _This is the end._

* * *

 **Knockturn Alley, December 1957**

She wakes back in his bed as she does so often now, it is involuntary, it is where she goes when her mind finally gives in, and her pillow is drenched with blood.

He stirs next to her and she knows he will wake any second now.

Her time is up.

She must go back... no forward, now, she must see if what she has done is enough to undo...undo everything.

She is too weak for subterfuge. She pulls the Time-Turner out and disappears right in front of him as he opens his eyes, and she takes pained pleasure in his stricken face.

* * *

 **Scotland, 1999**

She emerges in her own time for the first time in many years or maybe just five seconds, and she falls straight across Harry's body. His limbs are bent all wrong; he is staring emptily into the sky.

 _Oh, so that is the colour of your eyes, I remember now._

She looks around, sees corpses piled atop corpses, there are fires, there is the stench of burning flesh and she remembers the witch trials in Scotland and this is the same, is it not the same, with witches and wizards and their bones ablaze.

Only, we did this to each other.

She recognises hysteria when she hears her own breathless giggling.

A breeze clears the smoke for a second and she sees the ruins of the castle up on the hill. It is razed.

Everything is razed, and everything is the same except everything is _worse_. This present, this new truth, is more heinous, more ruined than the one she left behind.

The one she set out to mend.

There is only one chance left, only one, and it is every shade of hopeless but what else has she got but that?

So she spins again, attempts something she has never attempted before, what is there to lose, and she disappears, and she leaves only her broken giggle behind.

* * *

 **St. Pancras, London, 2143**

A jump into an unknown future, well past her own time, proves near fatal and she emerges in the wrong place and she coughs blood onto the pavement. Her strength is waning fast and she is far too weak to alter her appearance in any way, too weak for even temporary Disillusionment.

A quick visit to the archives at the New Ministry nearly kills her right there, but she finds what she thinks she might be looking for. Then she slowly walks the streets of what remains of Muggle London with her hair covering her face.

Limps towards the British Library, the only Muggle structure of note left in the land.

And she stands at the bottom of those steps and marvels, but is not surprised, that he let this building stand. That he did not burn it to the ground and start history anew.

His story.

History

Then again, he always did love books. And maybe her. Sometimes.

She managed that much, at least.

Onwards then.

She enters, and it echoes. Fewer books, fewer books than before. Fewer people.

It is not hard to find what she is looking for. Small and tattered and insignificant as the little diary is, hidden away, it is protected with so many enchantments and curses that it shrieks and howls to her injured mind.

She cannot tell if it is here as a trap, or as the very last remnant of twisted sentimentality.

Both. Of course it is both.

She picks it up with shaking hands, knows she has triggered the wards, knows they will come for her soon.

' _Hermione Jean Granger_ ' has been scratched out, and underneath it, in his elegant hand, is written ' _Helena_ '.

Just Helena.

 _Oh Tom, couldn't you bear to burn your truth? Burn it like they burned Alexandria, like all the victors across all of history have burned all the books, all the libraries? Like you burned the rest of the world?_

She wonders where and when he found it, but her memories are broken and it does not matter anyway. Clearly he found it too late for it to change anything at all. Clearly, by the time he found it, it just made everything even worse.

She strokes her diary; follow the lines of his penmanship on the cover with a shaking finger.

' _Helena_ '. Well, fine. She is more Helena than Hermione now.

He kept his word then.

He hates everything she stands for, is, but she was all he had back then, and he did give her her tomb. This Muggle library is her mausoleum and he let it stand for her. Because he thought he loved her. Because sometimes...sometimes she thought she loved him back.

And because when he lost her, he lost the very last moorings to a soul.

 _I guess you never did stand a chance, you evil bastard. Look what I did, look how I broke everything. I made you worse. I miss you already._

She is crying again.

Soon this is all that will remain of her entire existence.

Not even her own name is left. Just words on paper, her handwriting increasingly warped, just words and the reason the world went mad.

She failed and everyone are still dead. More people are dead.

And she feels the pops of Apparation. They are many.

She did this. All of it. She made him like this.

She does not remember how but she is on her knees on the floor and she is wailing and she is shrieking with laughter and they are closing in on all sides. Dressed in cloaks, and still, after all this time, with the same tattoo. They will catch her and hurt her and bring her to him, the way he is now, the way he is here.

The monster she made.

She tucks the worn little diary inside her robes, it suffocates her heart next to the Time-Turner, and it is her only hope now.

She laughs in their faces and she turns time one final time.

* * *

 **Knockturn Ally, December 1957**

Where else can she go but back to him?

She crashes to the floor out in the hallway and he comes running from the bedroom where she left him, falls down next to her, gathers her in his arms.

How unbearable it is that she feels safe there.

She curls towards him and coughs blood, it spatters across his pale face and vaguely she thinks how absurdly beautiful is looks, the abstract of her red on his white.

He shakes her, too hard really, but then he has never mastered gentleness. She had not been able to teach him that.

So many failures.

"What happened? What is going on? Talk to me! _Tell_ me!"

She smiles up at him, or at least she wants to.

"I tried, Tom. I really did try."

Her heart is broken and she is becoming mist, and his grip on her is desperate, the look on his face more desperate still. He sees the horror in her eyes and shakes her even harder, and her teeth clacks together and her neck whips back and forth. She bites her tongue, adds to the blood.

"Helena! Where did you go before? What did you see? Tell me what you saw!"

She feels it, there are seconds left, she is fading, being reclaimed by time.

"My name…" she pants and bubbles on blood "is not Helena."

"I know," he whispers, "I know it's not," and he kisses her forehead as tenderly as he is able, and she suddenly, sharply, remembers how she would kiss him there when he was a baby.

She had held him then, had tried to love him and change him. Now he is holding her, trying to love her back, but he cannot change anything either.

Not really. Not enough.

She does not know how, because moving is impossible, but she pulls the diary out, then drops it on the floor next to him when her fingers, transparent now, ghost straight through it.

"Take it," she whispers, but he does not even look, she is not sure he has seen or heard, but she cannot talk anymore either, there is too much blood in her mouth.

He presses his lips to hers, like he is trying to force some of his life into her, and he holds her harder, and he is as frantic as she has ever seen him. His lips are red with her blood and his eyes are cold but warm too, and he snarls, "I won't let this happen! I will keep you safe. I promise you."

As he flourishes his wand and moves it in a silent archaic language above her body, enveloping her in dark magic, she leans her head against his heart, and she knows differently.

 _(She closes her eyes. Just for a while: his beats are soothing)_

She drifts; she disappears.

Finally. She can give up.

* * *

...she wakes in his bed and this is so familiar that at first she does not react. But the crusted blood and the wrongness and the solidness of her skin flesh bones jar her enough that she tries to sit up, but she cannot.

He lounges by her side, and her diary is dangling from his hand and oh his face. It is lit from within with dark knowledge and glee, mordant, malignant, but there is something horrifically tender in his smile.

"You're alive thanks to dark magic that you yourself once introduced me to. You left me no choice. I couldn't lose you."

His voice is indifferent but his eyes are not. They burn, they are petrifying and beautiful chasms.

No, no, what has he done? She is cold, freezing cold, she feels _wrong_ , and is that her frantic breaths whistling in her ears? She claws at her chest, goes for her pockets, frenzied, panicked, where is it where is it?

She does not hear him at first because his voice is so soft, but there are enough knives in it that it finally cuts through to her.

"... I broke it, Hermione. Smashed it to pieces."

She stills as he strokes her hair, long fingers moving down to her throat, squeezing slightly, just enough, and she looks at him, meets his eyes square on as she finally allows the walls protecting her mind from him to fall.

Allows him to see everything.

She weeps…

... but she smiles too.

* * *

NB: I don't actually know if it's possible to split and make Horcruxes out of someone else's soul (with or without their permission), but I figured that if anyone could do it it was Riddle. Now they BOTH have a horcrux diary each! So romantic...

But..yeah...this isn't at all what I was aiming for. I was gunning for my usual 1500-ish word ditty and the plot was totally different but then it grew and grew and turned into something I don't know what. But this motherfucker's been stomping on a bunch of other plot bunnies and it is my hope that if I just publish it I can move on to other stuff. Like Avengers (angsty Thor! There isn't enough!). And more Cassian and Jyn. And and and.

I don't have a beta, and English is not my first language, so hit me up if you spot anything terrible.

I own nothing, JK owns pretty much the entire world.


End file.
